I fired out a couple of yeast starters late last night and I wanted to use one today for brewing. They've been sitting for about 8 hours now and there is a small layer of foam on the top (maybe 1/4"). My other 2 starters had sat for about 2 days and had about 1-2" of foam residue on the sides. My question is if I use it today am I going to kill the yeast? Is this a complete waste of a starter, patience is not a virtue I possess and I want to brew today, but I don't want to kill my brew. Any thoughts?

The short answer: no. Eight hours isn't much time for you or I, but in a good starter that's three or four doublings. So, you have 8-16 times as much yeast as you started with.

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Remember one unassailable statistic, as explained by the late, great George Carlin: "Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!"

I won't disagree with you that it may not be the desired population of yeast, but the question was "is it too early". Under an "optimum" situation the answer would certainly be "no".

But at this point he has a viable yeast and he wants to brew now. I still stand by my answer to his question - "no" it is not too early.

Overall, he is in a much better position to pitch his yeast than someone who just pitched dry yeast of did not make a starter.

He'll just have to plan better next time, or put off brewing until tomorrow which may not be possible for him.

It's OK to have different brewing techniques. We all pick and choose which techniques are best for us (grain vs DME vs kit) and we all learn where we can take a shortcut here or there (2 oz of 5%AA vs 1 oz 10%AA), dry yeast vs a full blown liquid yeast starter, but in the end it's us brewing something we like whether or not we want to imitate a style of modifiy it to our tastes.

I've pitched WL straight from the bottle & had very good results. But, more yeast is better (yah, I know adding a gallon of yeast to a 5 gallon batch is a bad thing, but who ever does that?)

__________________
Remember one unassailable statistic, as explained by the late, great George Carlin: "Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!"